Bug Description

From what I see some packages have a de-facto set of maintainers and those are usually who sponsor any patch to them.
I think if for a certain package this is indeed considered to be true - and with the ack of the maintainers of course - they could either be dropped from the sponsoring list, or marked as such in a way that is obvious.

For instance I know that when there's package management related patches it is usually mvo that is handling them (maybe he'd prefer help but that's how it happend :) or grub and low-level plumbing are handled by a select group of Foundation hackers, mozilla packages have their own maintainers and strict rules, etc.

Some of these changes are already proposed by experienced contributors and can be dealt with in bug reports, IRC, mail, etc.
If these were filtered out, it would be easier to just get to the newcomers sending in universe patches to packages or random code fixes.

Maybe we need to do some more education and talk about how patch pilots should be working. Personally, as part of my shifts, I always try to reach out to people who might know more about a specific package, so the package doesn't sit there until they have time for their next review shift.

Stefano, they are only affected inasmuch people need to hunt for their contributions in a queue of sometimes significant size, with no popping up to the top of issues which can _only_ be dealt with via the sponsoring queue, as opposed to those that are likely to already be discussed on other channels as they involve experienced developers. I am pretty sure that ivoks, smoser and others I see here and who are involved with Ubuntu Server are not waiting for a random Ubuntu dev to hold their hands and sponsor their debdiff.

Daniell, iI think the main table view should encourage such an approach that you are taking and not have potential sponsors hunt and peck :) Some are not very familiar if they are stepping into existing communication that is already going in the right direction and thus even lead to futile or duplicated work.

I dislike blacklisting specific package, because these packages would go off the radar. Instead we could add a column for "maintainers". Sponsorees should talk to these "maintainers" before sponsoring and doing duplicate work. The question is how to fill the "maintainers" column with data.